A study released Thursday examining board diversity at publicly traded companies in Alberta produced some encouraging statistics.

The report – produced by the Alberta Securities Commission and the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business — found the number of women named directors of companies whose principal jurisdiction is Alberta is increasing. Not fast enough, but rising nonetheless.

Of the 2,645 directors serving on the boards of Alberta-based issuers, 190 – or 7.2 per cent – were female in 2016. That compares with 6.6 per cent in 2015.

When the data was cut between the Toronto Stock Exchange-listed companies — the bigger caps – and the TSX Venture, the numbers skewed higher to the larger companies.

In hard numbers, this equates 1,208 directors, of which 134 – or 11.1 per cent are women. For the smaller TSX-V listed companies calling Alberta home, representation falls to just 3.9 per cent – right where it’s been for the past three years.

In aggregate, of the 459 companies surveyed, 137 – or 29.4 per cent – had at least one woman at the boardroom table last year, which isn’t much of an improvement from the 131, or 28.9 per cent, recorded last year.

The goal is to get to a threshold of women representing 30 per cent of board members.

Where there are encouraging signs is in the number of women appointed to board positions in the past year. Of the 84 new directors appointed to the boards of Alberta-based companies, 27 were, or 32.1 per cent, were female.

Ontario Securities Commission figures show that of 521 vacant seats at Ontario-based corporations, 15 per cent of newly appointed directors were women. The OSC’s method looked at the number of women appointed as a percentage of total appointments, including boards seats that went unfilled for reasons that included the desire to reduce the size of a board.

Still, the lack of female representation both at the board room table and in the senior ranks of corporations remains troublesome. As OSC chief executive Maureen Jensen told the Toronto Region Board of Trade last month, 15 per cent is not good enough. Not when the goal is 30 per cent.

That’s especially true in the oilpatch.

While larger corporations such as Suncor, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Cenovus and Encana are ahead of the curve because their governance processes tend to be more rigorous, the same is not necessarily true among the smaller cap cohort.

That’s because of their tendency to look for directors from a smaller population sample – which often involves the ‘I know someone …’ approach, rather than a commitment to finding candidates who fall outside the realm of the known.

No one is advocating for tokenism. Far from it. Companies need directors from many disciplines who can add value, and studies consistently show diversity around the boardroom table is directly linked to less ‘group think’ and better decision-making.

“While these results highlight that organizations are slowly beginning to recognize the importance of diverse representation on their boards, they also point to a troubling lack of female representation at the senior executive level,” said Loren Falkenberg, Haskayne’s associate dean of research and co-chair of the study’s advisory committee.

But, as usual, this is only part of the story.

In fact, it’s probably the end of the story – because by the time individuals are named to corporate boards, their careers are well underway. Unless you’re in the startup haven of Silicon Valley, the average age of directors at a resource company isn’t sub 35.

Where some of this can be addressed starts in school classrooms and the way maths and science are taught.

If there was one theme that came through loud and clear at last week’s Global Business Forum in Banff, it was the need for greater emphasis on STEM education in the school system. More students need to be inspired to study science, technology engineering and math.

And that includes one half of the population – girls.

It remains socially acceptable for girls to say they are bad at math. Math, like reading, is a basic skill. It’s not OK to say you are bad at reading – so why is it acceptable to say you aren’t good at math?

The energy sector is science heavy. That’s not changing.

Among the complaints heard from companies seeking female board members, and why there aren’t more around the boardroom table, is that there aren’t enough women in the upper echelons of management within the energy sector.

From a statistical perspective then, the more girls are inspired to study the STEM disciplines, the greater the probability that they become candidates for future board positions.

Programs such as Calgary’s Roots 2 STEM, which has been providing STEM-based programming in the school system and through summer camps for the last two years, is a step in the right direction.

We also need to rethink the math curriculum and pedagogy.

At a recent Calgary dinner where the professor emeritus of Queen’s University, Arthur McDonald, spoke, he was asked if he thought the way math is taught today versus when he was in high school would be sufficient to inspire a new generation of mathematicians and physicists.

McDonald, a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics last year, said he couldn’t opine on that question. But he did say the current curriculum tries to be ‘too clever’ in the early years at the expense of the basic building blocks that are important to understanding math.

Reading between the lines, what he meant is that the basics matter, especially in the context of being able to apply concepts and solve complex problems.

Teach math as a malleable language and it becomes accessible to all – girls and boys – math wizards and not.

And with that, many things can change, including growing the pipeline of girls who choose to pursue careers in the STEM disciplines and position themselves for management roles in science-heavy sectors and eventually populate the boardroom tables.

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